...working groups for 2013. The three groups will cover Carrier ID, Deliberate Interference, and VSAT. The announcement follows a successful annual conference, which was held in Dubai last month. The conference discussed the recent success of the Carrier ID for the Olympics initiative, but the feeling was that more is needed. The reorganised group for “Carrier ID (SCPC)” working group will be headed up by Roger Franklin, CEO, Crystal Solutions.

“The Carrier ID for the Olympics initiative proved extremely successful, with very little interference instances throughout the event,” said Franklin. “We now need to continue the momentum and work towards introducing the new Carrier ID technology across all types of SCPC carriers and refining the inter-operator workflow in time for the major sporting events of 2013 and 2014.”

Another key topic for the conference was deliberate jamming and pirating now referred to as Deliberate Interference. It is widely reported as a growing problem for the majority of satellite operators and something, which is extremely challenging to resolve. The new working group titled “Deliberate Interference (Technology)”, chaired by Yasir Hassan, Director, Transmission Operations, ArabSat, will look at technology to tackle deliberate interference. This work will be co-ordinated with GVF, which is leading the industry's regulatory and political efforts to address the intentional-jamming challenge.

“Deliberate interference is increasing and it is not easy to solve individually,” said Hassan. “By pooling resources and developing practical initiatives and gathering evidence, we can begin to combat these instances.”

Now that satellite operators have presented new statistics on interference originating from VSAT terminals, a third new working group, “VSAT (Statistics)”, will work to aggregate accurate analysis and correlation between the statistics and fault types and then feed this critical information to the VSAT industry through the Global VSAT Forum (GVF). In addition, the group will offer practical technology initiatives to the VSAT community in order to reduce interference. The group will be headed up by Thomas van den Driessche, Director of Vertical Markets, Newtec.

“GVF is doing a great job of educating the VSAT community about satellite interference,” said van den Driessche. “There is a real need to support their efforts with some practical technology specifically for the VSAT community. We also owe the GVF these statistics if we are to make sensible progress.”

The new working groups are currently establishing goals for 2013. If you would like to get involved, please contact the Chairman of each group.